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- 3960
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.918Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 3912
- text
- made flourishing again. He seemed to feel that in his deepest soul,
lurked an indefinite but potential faith, which could rule in the
interregnum of all hereditary beliefs, and circumstantial persuasions;
not wholly, he felt, was his soul in anarchy. The indefinite regent had
assumed the scepter as its right; and Pierre was not entirely given up
to his grief's utter pillage and sack.
To a less enthusiastic heart than Pierre's the foremost question in
respect to Isabel which would have presented itself, would have been,
_What_ must I do? But such a question never presented itself to Pierre;
the spontaneous responsiveness of his being left no shadow of
dubiousness as to the direct point he must aim at. But if the object was
plain, not so the path to it. _How_ must I do it? was a problem for
which at first there seemed no chance of solution. But without being
entirely aware of it himself, Pierre was one of those spirits, which not
in a determinate and sordid scrutiny of small pros and cons--but in an
impulsive subservience to the god-like dictation of events themselves,
find at length the surest solution of perplexities, and the brightest
prerogative of command. And as for him, _What_ must I do? was a question
already answered by the inspiration of the difficulty itself; so now he,
as it were, unconsciously discharged his mind, for the present, of all
distracting considerations concerning _How_ he should do it; assured
that the coming interview with Isabel could not but unerringly inspire
him there. Still, the inspiration which had thus far directed him had
not been entirely mute and undivulging as to many very bitter things
which Pierre foresaw in the wide sea of trouble into which he was
plunged.
If it be the sacred province and--by the wisest, deemed--the inestimable
compensation of the heavier woes, that they both purge the soul of
gay-hearted errors and replenish it with a saddened truth; that holy
office is not so much accomplished by any covertly inductive reasoning
process, whose original motive is received from the particular
affliction; as it is the magical effect of the admission into man's
inmost spirit of a before unexperienced and wholly inexplicable element,
which like electricity suddenly received into any sultry atmosphere of
the dark, in all directions splits itself into nimble lances of
purifying light; which at one and the same instant discharge all the air
of sluggishness and inform it with an illuminating property; so that
objects which before, in the uncertainty of the dark, assumed shadowy
and romantic outlines, now are lighted up in their substantial
realities; so that in these flashing revelations of grief's wonderful
fire, we see all things as they are; and though, when the electric
element is gone, the shadows once more descend, and the false outlines
of objects again return; yet not with their former power to deceive; for
now, even in the presence of the falsest aspects, we still retain the
impressions of their immovable true ones, though, indeed, once more
concealed.
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